New York, 9-10 October, 2026 –On October 9–10, the Human Rights Institute’s TrialWatch Project hosted the inaugural FairTrial x AI Hackathon at Columbia Law School, bringing together students from across disciplines around a central question: How can technology help protect fair trial rights and freedom of expression?
Over two days, participants worked in teams on three challenges drawn directly from TrialWatch’s work monitoring criminal trials against journalists and others at risk of unjust prosecution around the world. The first track asked teams to develop ways to identify important cases early enough for TrialWatch to monitor them. The second focused on helping lawyers turn trial observations, court records, and other case materials into international human rights law assessments. The third looked at how technology could help turn trial-monitoring findings into stronger advocacy and impact.
The weekend began with a conversation about both the promise and the limits of emerging technologies in human rights work. Kate Berry, Senior Corporate Counsel, Human Rights Law at Microsoft; and Anna Diakun, Senior Staff Attorney and Managing Attorney of the Fellowship Program at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, and Tejal Jesrani, Director of the TrialWatch Project at Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute; joined students to discuss how technology can support human rights practitioners while also raising difficult questions around accuracy, accountability, privacy, and the role of human judgment. Tejal Jesrani said the hackathon was built on “a simple but powerful idea – that tackling today’s most intractable human rights challenges requires more than legal expertise alone. It requires bringing different disciplines together to imagine – and build – new possibilities.”
From there, the interdisciplinary teams got to work. Over the rest of Friday and Saturday, students developed, tested, and refined their ideas with support from mentors before presenting their projects to a panel of judges. What began as early concepts quickly turned into working prototypes, with teams demonstrating not only what their tools could do, but how they might respond to some of the practical challenges that arise in trial monitoring.
Reflecting on the event, judge Kate Berry emphasized both the creativity of the teams and the practical potential of their work: “The TrialWatch Fair Trial and AI Hackathon was a powerful demonstration of what can happen when technology, legal expertise, and creative thinking come together around a shared human rights challenge. I was inspired by both the ingenuity of the projects and their focus on real-world impact. The Hackathon underscored the tremendous potential of AI, when developed and deployed thoughtfully, to help advance human rights and access to justice. It was an honor to witness and participate.”
Three teams received awards recognizing different strengths in their projects.
1. Fair Trial Grand Award — TrialTrace. Team members: Brooklyn Fergerson, Ashvini Meshram, Rita Osi, and Kenan Weaver. TrialTrace focused on one of the most practical challenges in trial monitoring: keeping track of information spread across different documents, communications, and stages of a case. TrialWatch works in many different jurisdictions and sometimes finds it hard to access a complete case record and identify missing documents from the record. The team proposed a secure collaborative workspace that brings case documents, communications, and review into one place. The platform is designed to help TrialWatch lawyers identify gaps in the information available, track outstanding requests, and understand what needs to happen next. For the team, the experience also highlighted the possibilities that emerge when technical innovation is grounded in a concrete human rights problem: “This hackathon was a great opportunity to explore how AI can be used to make a meaningful impact in the legal field and support the pursuit of justice. One of our biggest takeaways was learning more about international law and the significant role that organizations like TrialWatch can play in promoting accountability and advancing justice through technology. The experience showed us how we can use innovation to address real-world challenges and create meaningful change.”2. Best Technical Innovation — Ratio. Team members: Emeric Chang, Hardik Kafle, Komal Neupane, and Sahil Kharel. Ratio took on a different challenge: how to move from a large and often fragmented trial record to a structured assessment of potential fair trial concerns. The team developed a tool that summarizes the case, performs targeted checks against protections under Articles 9 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), flags issues for further legal review, and links findings directly back to the underlying case record. It can also compare the facts of a case with relevant past cases, helping lawyers identify potentially useful jurisprudence. The team also designed Ratio to run locally on a user’s device, allowing sensitive case materials to remain on the lawyer’s computer rather than being sent to cloud-based AI services.3. Best Human Rights Impact — Human Rights Review Prototype. Team members: Armani Cheng, Chris Huang, and Nanjing Lin. The team developed a prototype aimed at helping lawyers navigate lengthy court records more efficiently. Their tool uses a fine-tuned legal language model as a first layer of review, highlighting passages that may raise human rights concerns and connecting them to potentially relevant provisions of the ICCPR. A lawyer can then review the suggested analysis in context and determine whether the material actually supports a finding of a rights violation.
For HRI TrialWatch, the hackathon also opened a broader conversation about how emerging technologies might responsibly support trial monitoring across different jurisdictions and legal systems, particularly where practitioners are working with large amounts of sensitive information and where inaccurate analysis can have real consequences.
The Human Rights Institute will continue engaging with participants and exploring the ideas that emerged from the weekend, including whether elements of the projects can inform TrialWatch’s future work.
Learn more about the Hackathon here: LINK TO THE BOOKLET
For more information about HRI TrialWatch Project, please visit https://hri.law.columbia.edu/our-work/equality-and-justice/trialwatch-project.
For more on CFJ’s global work, visit https://cfj.org/trialwatch.
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The Human Rights Institute advances international human rights through education, advocacy, fact-finding, research, scholarship, and critical reflection. We work in partnership with advocates, communities, and organizations pushing for social change to develop and strengthen the human rights legal framework and mechanisms, promote justice and accountability for human rights violations, and build and amplify collective power.